Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (21 page)

There’s a reason that one TV ad, which pans slowly over sad, abandoned pets while a Sarah McLachlan song plays in the background, makes me scramble for the remote, or that Proctor & Gamble “Dear Mom” ad that played during the Olympics made me bawl my eyes out. They tell effective, empathic stories and do so using mostly music and imagery.

This isn’t to say that the best videos will necessarily be the weepiest ones. What matters is the story. Effective pitches weave a narrative that centers on the struggles borne by an individual or group and touches on themes of our common humanity and our desire to overcome life’s challenges. Online fund-raising, at its heart, requires telling the story of an individual, one person, and connects with the person on the other side of the screen.

It’s for this reason that I remain impressed with the
Kony 2012
phenomenon. This was a brief, yet powerful moment where social media were used to rapidly escalate global awareness of the plight of kidnapped child soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel militia fighting in northern Uganda and surrounding countries under the direction of a man named Joseph Kony. In March 2012, a group called Invisible Children, Inc., released a thirty-minute film about Joseph Kony and promoted the film across social media using the hashtags #makekonyfamous, #kony2012, and #stopkony. The cause soon went viral. Within a short period of time, the movie had tens of millions of views and the attention of the world.

It wasn’t long, however, before
Kony 2012
faded from view. Many organizations that had been trying to raise awareness of Kony for years felt slighted by the attention paid to these newcomers. No viable plan was ever organized to stop Kony. Then, one of the filmmakers had a public breakdown, and the organization never really recovered. Joseph Kony remains at large, and “Kony 2012” is now a kind of cynical shorthand for a social-media-based awareness campaign that looks grandiose but accomplishes nothing.

However,
Kony 2012
actually accomplished quite a lot and deserves to be praised. The Invisible Children group took a humanitarian crisis that hardly anyone knew about and, within a matter of days, leveraged the power of Internet culture and social media to inform the world. They showed that it could be done. Perhaps they have yet to accomplish the ultimate goal of stopping the Lord’s Resistance Army, but not even the United Nations has managed to do that yet.

The key takeaway is this: the reason
Kony 2012
became so well known so fast was because the YouTube movie told an effective story. The movie didn’t just say there were children suffering; it showed you. It humanized what would have otherwise been just another foreign news story. Have people made films about the suffering occurring in far-off places before? Yes, but no one had ever done so leveraging the power of the Internet to inform so many, so quickly. Perhaps the group was not equipped to handle the scale of the movement they had started, but that is no reason to discount what they did accomplish.

As for what the next Kony 2012 will be, all bets are off. Anything is possible.

Think Global

In the age of the Internet, distance is no longer a barrier to assistance. It’s just as easy to donate to a cause based thousands of miles away as it is to donate to someone standing right in front of you. Just go online, click “donate,” and you’re done. Or send a text. That’s it.

What this means is there is no such thing anymore as a purely local cause. What in the past may have been the concern of only a small, local community—a drive to fix the church roof, for example—can now be the concern of the entire globe. When we promote causes that resonate with universal human sympathies, dreams, and desires, we can move the entire world.

Take, for example, the story of Karen Klein. Karen was a bus monitor for middle school children in upstate New York. In June 2012, she was the recipient of some harsh verbal abuse from the kids on her bus. Using their smartphones, they filmed themselves calling her, among other insults, a “f***ing fatass” and uploaded the video to the Internet the next day, under the title “Making the Bus Monitor Cry.” Soon, the video racked up hundreds of thousands, then millions of views. As the video went viral and attention increased, the kids responsible for the abuse were punished by the school district and made to apologize to Karen.

The Internet community didn’t stop there. Within days, an Indiegogo account was set up on her behalf by a complete stranger to her, with the aim of gathering $5,000 to send her on a vacation. Within a month, the crowdfunding site raised over $700,000. With some of that money, Karen set up the Karen Klein Anti-Bullying Foundation, and she retired on the rest. What once would have been the concern of a few local school board officials was now the concern of the entire world.

So, there’s a lesson here for everyone using the Internet to drive awareness for a cause. When the world can hear, be prepared for the world to listen—and be ready to enlist its support. With every cause, it is vital to think globally. This means turning a local story into a global story, and a local issue into a global issue—something people will take an interest in even if it’s outside the realm of their everyday lives and communities.

In late 2010, I joined the Global Entrepreneurs Council of the United Nations Foundation. The council brings together young leaders from many different industries, civil society, and the media to help find new solutions to tackle some of the biggest problems facing the world, from war to poverty to climate change.

I joined the council to drive action on initially one issue: malaria. Malaria isn’t a major national challenge for the United States, and it is not something that the average American necessarily thinks about. But by focusing on telling stories about just how devastating malaria is for communities in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, our campaign aimed to tell a universal story—about people and societies struggling to overcome great challenges—and to tap into the natural goodness and kindness of Americans when faced with people in need. Through conferences and town halls broadcast online, we explained to audiences the death toll caused by malarial infection from easily preventable mosquito bites, and we provided moving first-person testimony from malaria survivors. As part of this, I also organized a malaria prevention town hall at Facebook, the first for a charitable cause. During this, I shared a personal story about a young man I had known from Stanford’s business school, who had fallen victim to malaria and died during his spring-break travels. This sad story showed that malaria isn’t just a tragedy for distant lands; it’s something that affects many people from communities all over the world, from all walks of life.

In the end, anything that speaks to universal struggles of hope or loss—struggles to survive, to get an education, or to live a good life, free from fear, abuse, and suffering—has the potential to find a global audience.

In January 2012, the social media profile photos of millions of people all across the world “went dark.” They turned completely black in protest of the threat of online censorship posed by two proposed pieces of American legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act, or PIPA). Other global organizations, such as Global Voices online and Wikipedia, also disabled their home pages in protest. Even though SOPA and PIPA were strictly American pieces of legislation, because they affected the Internet, they potentially affected the entire globe, and so they got the world’s attention. The cofounder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, explained that they had disabled their home page “to send a broad global message that the Internet as a whole will not tolerate censorship.”

SOPA and PIPA quickly failed. By the next day, most of the bill’s cosponsors had deserted the legislation, and many more lawmakers from both Republican and Democratic parties had come out to voice their opposition. All this was because of the giant outpouring of online opposition on that day of action, swelled by millions of people and organizations from around the world.

If you ever wanted to rally the world around a cause, now is the time. Just give people something to do. Of course, in order for a cause to resonate with the world, it needs to be understood by the people of the world. So, we must speak a common language.

Sometimes a message can be spread with more than just words. Take, for example, the story of “Dancing” Matt Harding, a twenty-nine-year-old software developer from Connecticut who shot to Internet stardom in 2005 after he made a funny and moving video of himself dancing in different countries around the world. He went on to make two more videos in 2008 and 2012, which have also been watched by tens of millions of people. What made these videos go viral internationally was that Matt’s dancing with different groups of people demonstrated the common humanity that unites everyone, from Massachusetts to Mongolia.

Online and offline, we all share, consume, and are influenced by unspoken forms of communication, such as pictures, memes, music, symbols, body language, and yes, dancing. The red equality banner in support of same-sex marriage had no words, but it was effective precisely because it spoke in a common visual language that was shareable and meme-able. In fact, the term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins to describe an idea that becomes powerful and contagious by social imitation and variation—sort of like a gene in the natural world, but for ideas.

We’ve also seen, recently, the emergence of a new universal language built around the hashtag. Hashtags are the words that follow the pound symbol you see everywhere online, but they’re particularly popular on Twitter and Instagram. A hashtagged word serves as a kind of marker that leads you to other tweets or photos tagged with the same word. Hashtags can cross platforms and signify solidarity with an idea, whether it’s on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or even written on a protest sign or spray-painted on a wall. Choose the right hashtag, and it can define a cause for the world.

One of the most popular Facebook pages for employees, when I worked there, was the “Facebook Culinary Team” page. Facebook has a team of gourmet chefs who make delicious, free meals for employees—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—a wonderful perk that I sorely missed after I left and realized that my refrigerator was mostly just a storage unit for Diet Coke and Asher’s bottles. The culinary team decided that rather than just hang a menu on the door of the cafeteria, they would create a Facebook page and use that page to post the day’s culinary delights.

This quickly became a multiple-times-a-day must-visit page for all of us. Because the menus were only posted a few minutes before mealtime, we would all sit there, refreshing the page over and over again. It was imperative to know what was being served, so that if it was pasta day or taco day, you knew to drop everything and rush over immediately, or risk being caught in a thirty-minute line.

One day I realized something. There were about a thousand employees in Facebook’s Palo Alto office at the time . . . but there were about four thousand people who had liked the “Facebook Culinary Team” page. That meant that there were three thousand people who had absolutely nothing to do with working at Facebook but just wanted to see what we were eating for lunch every day.

To this day, that page remains my creative inspiration. By speaking the universal language of food photos, the Facebook chefs were able to create an experience that was truly engaging and far-reaching.